The Island of Missing Trees

Shafak splits her Cyprus novel between a human love story, a Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot couple separated by the island's civil conflict, and chapters narrated by a fig tree that has migrated with a cutting to London. Reviewers were most taken with how the novel handles inheritance and silence: children absorb their parents' trauma not through direct testimony but obliquely, through gaps and evasions. The talking-tree device is a genuine risk, it could easily tip into whimsy, but multiple reviews credited it with giving the book a wider, more patient timescale than the human plot alone would allow.